To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
It is still proprietary, since you are not allowed to modify the derivative work when licensed under a proprietary license.
BSD and MIT allows for sublicensing essentially resulting in some derivative works being GPL'ed and some derivative works being proprietary. The latter part is controversial for some, and the first part is controversial for others.
What we often forget is that there's nothing in the BSD license that guarantees the availability of corresponding source code. You can distribute a modification in binary form only regardless of whether you want to retain the BSD license or would rather relicense it altogether. The BSD license is just as suitable a license for proprietary "freeware" as it is for open source software. Often folks claim that GPL/BSD is an issue of free software vs. open source software. But BSD is not even an open source license by my interpretation (although the OSI might disagree). It's just a really permissive license that is often used by open source projects.
It's not even a very good license for what it's intending to accomplish. Many developers and vendors that seriously consider the available ultra-permissive non-copyleft, non-share-alike licenses seem to favor the Apache version 2 license.
Maybe I need to explain more verbose. Because you're getting offensive, it seems you did not understand my statement, which may be caused by the fact that english is not my native language. So let me give an example.
Let's have a distribution A consisting of the parts Q, W and E. All of them are under BSD license. A developer uses them as a base for his work and derives his own Q' and W' from Q and W, he adds T and Z which he has developed on his own. His final product is called U and is released under a proprietary license. The developer ensures the BSD license to be included in U, as well as he mentions that his Q' and W' are based on Q and W, originally programmed by the respective authors (names follow). As far as I understood, the developer now may release U under the terms he wants, such as T and Z where he holds the definite copyright.
A = (Q, W, E) -> U = (Q', W', T, Z)
BSDL(Q), BSDL(W), BSDL(E) -> BSDL(A)
BSDL(Q'), BSDL(W'), PL(T), PL(Z) -> PL(U)
but also:
PL(Q'), PL(W'), PL(T), PL(Z) -> PL(U)
Please note: Q, W, E and A won't be affected at all. They stay BSDL.
Let's now assume A not being BSDL, but GPL. The rest of the conditions are assumed to stay the same. Now the developer may not release Q' and W' under any other license than the GPL. Because his final product U contains GPL parts Q' and W' next to his own work T and Z, the whole product U is GPL now. Furthermore, he needs to contribute back Q' and W' to the original Q and W.
A = (Q, W, E) -> U = (Q', W', T, Z)
GPL(Q), GPL(W), GPL(E) -> GPL(A)
GPL(Q'), GPL(W'), PL(T), PL(Z) -> GPL(U)
Here, Q, W, E and A won't be affected at all. They stay GPL, of course.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Please explain clearly, backed up by facts and examples (if needed or useful), don't scream around nothing else but "BULLSHIT", that's plain impolite.
Personally, I like the idea of the GPL. The community and the developers benefit from the works other developers do on basis of existing code. So everyone benefits from the improvement made by one. No one may take GPL code, cut out the license and the names of the developers and sell it with a new sticker on the box. But the BSDL allows this under special circumstances, as tried to explain above.






Member since:
2006-05-19
What is BSDL can get something else (GPL, proprietary).
BULLSHIT
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.